Spotting the bots with brains

How do you tell just how smart your robot is? Simple&colon; give it a universal IQ test.

Traditional measures of human intelligence often won’t be appropriate for systems that have senses, environments and cognitive capacities very different from our own. So Shane Legg and Marcus Hutter at the Swiss Institute for Artificial Intelligence in Manno-Lugano have drafted an alternative test that will allow the intelligence of vision systems, robots, natural language processing programs or trading agents to be compared and contrasted despite their broad and disparate functions.

Although there is no consensus on what exactly human intelligence is, most views appear to cluster around the idea that it hinges on a general ability to achieve goals in a wide range of environments, says Legg.

The same can be applied to an AI system, by measuring its ability to carry out complex tasks within its particular environment, compared with ...

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